A potpourri of major league happenings between 1900 and 1978. Includes records, anecdotes, photographs, and biographical information.

Richard Lederer's Classic Literary Trivia from Mythology, Shakespeare, and the Bible What biblical character said, "Am I my brother's keeper?" (Cain) Who was the chief of the ancient Greek gods? (Zeus) Shakespeare's plays are generally classified into which three categories? (tragedies, comedies, and histories)

This elegant essay exemplifies Blumenberg's ideas about the ability of the historical study of metaphor to illuminate essential aspects of being human. Originally published in the same year as his monumental Work on Myth, Shipwreck with Spectator traces the evolution of the complex of metaphors related to the sea, to shipwreck, and to the role of the spectator in human culture from ancient Greece to modern times. The sea is one of humanity's oldest metaphors for life, and a sea journey, Blumenberg observes, has often stood for our journey through life. We all know the role that shipwrecks can play in this journey, and at some level we have all played witness to others' wrecks, standing in safety and knowing that there is nothing we can do to help, yet fixed comfortably or uncomfortably in our ambiguous role as spectator. Through Blumenberg's seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of letters, from ancient texts through nineteenth-century reminiscences and modern speeches, we see layer upon layer revealed in the meanings humans have given to these metaphors; and in this way we begin to understand what metaphors can do that more straightforward modes of expression cannot. This edition of Shipwreck with Spectator also includes "Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality", an essay that recounts the evolution of Blumenberg's ideas about metaphorology in the years following his early manifesto "Paradigms for a Metaphorology".

This is the first volume of Goldziher's Muslim Studies , which ranks highly among the classics of the scholarly literature on Islam. Indeed, the two volumes, originally published in German in 1889-1890, can justly be counted among those that laid the foundations of the modern study of Islam as a religion and a civilization. The first study deals with the reaction of Islam to the ideals of Arab tribal society, to the attitudes of early Islam to the various nationalities and more especially the Persians, and culminates in the chapter on the Shu'ubiya movement which represents the reaction of the newly converted peoples, and again more especially the Persians, to the idea of Arab superiority. The second essay is the famous study on the development of the Hadith, the "Traditions" ascribed to Muhammed, in which the Hadith is shown to reflect the various trends of early Islam: Goldziher's name is mainly associated with the critical study of the Hadith, of which this essay is the chief monument. The third essay is about the cult of saints, which, though contrary to the spirit and letter of the earliest Islam, played such an important part in its subsequent development. These essays, with the author's marvelous richness of information, profound historical sense, and sympathetic insight into the motive forces of religion and civilization, are today as fresh as at the time of their original publication and their reissue is indispensable for the growing number of students of Islam. Hamid Dabashi contributes a major eighty-five-page study of Goldziher's life and scholarship, situating both in the intellectual and political currents of his own time while evaluating his work in the context of the current debate over Orientalism. Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921) has been described as Europe's most influential student of the Middle East. He was born in Hungary into an Orthodox Jewish family. He was honored by universities and academies in many countries for his contribution to oriental studies and was hailed as a founder of the scholarship of Islam. S.M. Stern was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Hamid Dabashi is professor of Persian Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of, among other works, the acclaimed Authority in Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment of the Umayyads , issued by Transaction, which won the Association of American Publishers Award for most outstanding professional and scholarly publication in religion and philosophy.

“I have read all of Daniel Aaron’s books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.” —Harold Bloom “ The Americanist is the absorbing intellectual autobiography of Daniel Aaron, who is the leading proponent and practitioner of American Studies. Written with grace and wit, it skillfully blends Daniel Aaron’s personal story with the history of the field he has done so much to create. This is a first-rate book by a first-rate scholar.” —David Herbert Donald, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron’s anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard. Aaron writes with unsentimental nostalgia about his childhood in Los Angeles and Chicago and his later academic career, which took him around the globe, often in the role of America’s accidental yet impartial critic. When Walt Whitman, whom Aaron frequently cites as a touchstone, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he could have been describing Daniel Aaron—the consummate erudite and Renaissance individual whose allegiance to the truth always outweighs mere partisan loyalty. Not only should Aaron’s book stand as a resplendent and summative work from one of the finest thinkers of the last hundred years, it also succeeds on its own as a first-rate piece of literature, on a par with the writings of any of its subjects. The Americanist is a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century writers Aaron interviewed, interacted with, or otherwise encountered throughout his life: Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, Sinclair Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Crowe Ransom, Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, to name only a few. Aaron’s frank and personal observations of these literary lights make for lively reading. As well, scattered throughout The Americanist are illuminating portraits of American presidents living and passed—miniature masterworks of astute political observation that offer dazzlingly fresh approaches to well-trod subjects.

FRAGILE EARTH v1.2 CONTAINS 12 NEW SETS OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER IMAGES, including flooding on the Arabian Peninsular, a dust storm at Sydney Harbour, the expansion of Tehran’s city limits, and ice melting on Hudson Bay. Fragile Earth is a stunning photography app giving a birdseye view of climate change, urbanization and nature’s raw power. It shows what happens to our planet when rivers flood or dry up, mountains erupt, glaciers melt and cities sprawl outward. STUNNING PHOTOGRAPHY APPSee years pass under your fingertips by swiping across before-and-after images. Explore how Dubai has grown from a small city to a thriving metropolis over the last 10 years, or how the notorious Warming Island got its name since 1985.The top photography app contains some of the world’s best environmental images, giving you detailed ecological snapshots from around the globe. Beautiful, shocking and thought-provoking, Fragile Earth provides thought provoking portraits of our world – its beauty, vastness and vulnerability. SEE THE WORLD CHANGE IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES The images can viewed by country/region, category and date. Each can also be shared via facebook, twitter or email. NEW to Fragile Earth v1.2:Flooding, Arabian Peninsula, Oman, Saudi Arabia and United Arab EmiratesCollapsing sea stack, The Twelve Apostles, Victoria, AustraliaDust storm, Sydney Harbour Bridge, New South Wales, AustraliaCity expansion, Tehran, IranRhone Glacier retreat, SwitzerlandWildfire Smog, St Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow, RussiaShrinking lake, Lake Urmia, IranShrinking sea and salt projects, The Dead SeaSea Ice in Bristol Bay, Alaska, United States of AmericaTohoku Tsunami one year on, Ishinomaki, JapanMelting ice, Hudson Bay, CanadaLandscape change, Gulf of Fonseca, Honduras and Nicaragua Developed by Aimer Media, the team behind The Tate Guide to Modern Art Terms and The Worlds Heritage apps.

Combining arithmetical oddities with historical facts, numbers in literature, art and music, statistical information and a range of other numerical oddities, this book aims to provide a reference source for collectors of information. It unearths some bizarre and amusing arithmetical coincidences as well as providing the material for deciding whether Douglas Adams was right about 42 being the answer to life, the Universe and Everything. Information contained in the book includes: the fact that the number three is the highest number in the language of the Yancos tribe of the Amazon; that the number of cups of tea drunk each day by the average Briton is identical to the number of frogs eaten each year per capita in France - four; and that the number four is also the number of months an oyster can survive out of water, the fingers on each of Mickey Mouse's hands and Edgar Wallace's Just Men.

Final Edition is a one-issue-only political magazine written by people who are aesthetes and literary writers and edited by Wallace Shawn, who seriously believes that part of our national problem is that the people who run the country have a crude and minimal imaginative life and are too little acquainted with the quartets of Beethoven. The issue consists of five pieces: "Before the Election—Fragments from a Diary 2004" by Wallace Shawn The diarist broods on the analogy between the addiction to pornography and nationalistic obsessions, and he wonders whether a collection of people who vote in a kind of sleepwalking ignorance can ever be called a democracy. "Invitation to a Degraded World" by Jonathan Schell In this essay, Schell meditates on the comic book/disaster movie view of life, in which bin Laden and George Bush are both immersed, and discusses the "standing army" stationed in all of our homes, the media. "The Webern Variations" by Mark Strand Strand’s hauntingly delicious poem explores what is most poignantly beautiful, while exploring the themes of darkness, descent, decline, and nothingness. Wallace Shawn Interviews Noam Chomsky For those with no acquaintance with Chomsky, this could make a wonderful introduction, while offering surprising insights to those who know him well. Chomsky is electric with vitality, wit, and rage as he ranges ferociously across the present and ancient worlds, giving his thoughts on the development of the internet, the 2004 election, and the God of the Bible. In an odd way, the interview highlights the inspirational and optimistic quality of this enormously angry man. "The Twilight of the Superheroes" by Deborah Eisenberg In this brooding, passionate, and brilliant short story, Deborah Eisenberg paints a brutally honest portrait of New York City today and of our lives today, wherever we live. Through observing the lives of some sophisticated residents of the great metropolis, we encounter truths which are both poetic and deeply political.

This book by noted author Mark Kurlansky draws on philosophy, religion, literature, politics to ask what may well be the 20 most-important questions in human history.